Posted: Sun 02 Sep 2012, 10:07 Post subject:
Music descriptionSubject description: What would be the perfect file format for music description

Background.
Thunor has lately given gtkdialog some improvements that is directly related to pMusic performance. We are very lucky having the developer of a framework inside the kennel.

pMusic is not having its own native file format, but has always used the m3u standard. This is a common standard, but works slow in pMusic as it must be imported into the pMusic standard. - So there is a native standard????? Well, there is always a standard, but in Pmusic it has not been able to have the same standard in both the playlist and in the Music-source list. - until now.

With the latest improvements of gtkdialog, it is possible to have one unified standard which will be used as the native file format to playlists and indexes in pMusic. So, How should this format look like.

I will give some initial thoughts, but I would really appreciate some feedback in the process to set the final standard.

I think the file-format should be exactly what we send to the <table> or <tree> widget in gtkdialog. - No import/export code is required - instant adding of 1 track or 200 tracks. That also means the important information must be placed first in the standard.

1.)
Today the track-length is the first column in the playlist. I am not sure if that is the most logic info to start with, but for now we keep it first.
2.)
It feels correct to use the metainfo (or just the filename) as the base info. Pmusic is today supporting both version 1 and 2 of id3 tags, but still only using tags-types supported by id3v1. That is Artist, Title, Album, TrackNr, Year and Genre. As I see it (and you are allowed so disagree), this is enough info in the playlist/sourcelist/pmu-file.
3.)
Now we have filled the 6 first columns if the new standard. Next I suggest to include a rating cloumn.
4.)
Now let's go for stream-info like bitrate and music-format (mpr, flac...). I don't know if samplerate and channels are important to include?
5.)
Full path is the most important info for pMusic. We have to know where the song a located to play it. But for the user this is seldom interesting, so I don't see any reason for pushing this earlier.
6.)
Now this last group of info is what I like the most. Let's keep info of where to look for lyrics, albumart and complete album tracklist. It could be link info to a local file or an URL. This info is for pMusic only - to quick locate more info about the track.

This will speed up the trackinfo grabbing a lot. Together with no 'importing...' pauses, and the fact that playlist handling will heavily improve we get an overall snappier use in pMusic 3. Today the playlist shouldn't keep too many tracks before things slow down. This will not be an issue in pMusic 3.

Ok, back to the native file format. Using the above specs it could look like:

Good news is that there is an international standard for Digitally Recorded and Stored Music, bad news is I don't have it as i'm not involved in a radio program broadcast any more, however you should be able to get it's content (or a url to get it) from your local Radio Station if you can find a 'program director'.

I do remember that there were a number of empty fields though and it covered things like play speed, track start and end delays (empty spaces), jump points (to shorten a track without it being obvious to the listener), and the like.

Hope this helps.

regards
scsijon_________________Puppy T290 - BarryK's Racy but with T2 Version 9.0. First Beta planned out end of August 2017.

I'm ok with whatever standard you choose as long as my cheapo mp3 player will display the author, title and track (or file) number as I listen to an mp3 audio book. I don't use the metadata from the audio CD when I convert it to mp3 because there's no telling how it will turn out. (A really smart guy once said the beautiful thing about standards is, there are so many to choose from. ) After I convert the CD to mp3 (with Pcdripper because it's easy to use and does the conversion the way I want it to) then I use Pmusic to add the metadata (tag all tracks) so my mp3 player shows it the way I want. The whole process is clunky and takes a while, but it's the only way I've found to get everything the way I want it.

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